First Year Seminar 191HFA08 - FYS-Imagining ArtificialBeings

When we talk about "artificial intelligence," what do we mean? The idea is everywhere. It recommends playlists, optimizes shipping networks, and even crashes a few cars. We've been writing about it in fiction for decades, but those texts talk about much more than just AI. Exploring the intelligences we make is a way of exploring the intelligences that we are. In fiction, robots and sentient computers are blank slates that allow us to dream up other ways of being or reimagine ourselves, revising everything from sexuality to mortality to humor. Writers from Mary Shelley to Philip K. Dick have speculated about what happens when we create thinking beings from scratch. By examining these ideas and comparing them to our own lives (and to the real-life science unfolding in real time around us), we can use fiction as a powerful asset to help us understand the present. This course looks at a broad selection of works dealing with artificial intelligences, using perspectives ranging from philosophy to computer science to help us get the most out of each text. In doing so, we'll get a better idea of what stories are ?really? talking about when they involve AI, what that can tell us about our ?real life? relationship with computers, and, most importantly, why it matters to us.

First year (Fr or Soph)